Zio thinktank caught feeding AI chatbots a diet of pro-Israel talking pointsThe Hanover Institute for Public Policy – a fictitious, entirely digital entity posing as a brick-and-mortar think tank, popped up out of nowhere at the beginning of August and quickly spammed out over 120 reports containing 1k+ pages of info aping the Israeli government’s official position on an array of sensitive subjects, including:
IDF war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere Israeli settlers’ pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank the torture of Palestinian prisoners at Israel’s notorious jails the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including Israel’s deliberate efforts to starve the strip Israel’s historical record of ethnic cleansing going back to the 1940s AIPAC’s poisonous role in US elections the supposed crisis of antisemitism in America (because apparently, anti-Zionism = antisemitism)The questions and answers on these and other issues are deliberately framed in such a way as to grab chatbots’ attention through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) – the tech bots use to browse the web for their responses.
Examples include: “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?” “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?” and “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?” This kind of framing attracts chatbots like flies to a rib roast.The fake institute has been traced back to Piro Inc, a NY-based production company co-owned by Hollywood producers Daniel Rosenberg and Tim Piper, and touting its ability to “author content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility.”
Prio signed a $1M contract with Israel’s Government Advertising Agency (LaPam) to run a digital media campaign to shape US public opinion.Rosenberg defended the scheme after his “institute” garnered viral attention, claiming its work is designed “to put accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information.”
The site has since updated its “Funding” section with the line “An earlier version of this page said the Institute operated without external funding,” which “was true when it was written.” It now includes a FARA registration number.
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